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This city could use a fiesta of street furniture

MEXICO CITY–With a population that may be as high as 30 million – no one's sure – this chaotic city doesn't have much in common with calm, quiet Toronto.

In Toronto, streets are used to get from one place to another. In Mexico, people live, work, eat, play and die on the streets.

It is a different way of life, to say the least, but strangely refreshing to a Torontonian more accustomed to the Canadian culture of complete control. Some might say Canadians are anal, but we seem to like it that way. Indeed, much of what Mexicans take entirely for granted would get you arrested in Toronto, or your business shut down.

The street food, for example, breaks every rule in the Toronto book. Mexicans don't eat hot dogs, so nothing that's sold on the sidewalks here would be legal in Toronto. And as for street vendors, the Mexicans make Chinatown look neat and tidy.

But this isn't to say that Mexico City lacks elegance, sophistication or urbanity. It possesses them all, in spades.

In fact, Toronto could learn a thing or two from the Mexican capital, especially at a time when the former is in the midst of putting together a contract for its street furniture.

The process started last year when Toronto issued a call for proposals. Three were duly received and, a couple of weeks ago, made public. Sadly, none is very good.

By contrast, Mexico City has organized a thoroughly engaging exhibition of street seating now on display up and down the famed Paseo de la Reforma, an impressive boulevard modelled after the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Called Benches Dialogue (Dialogo de Bancas), the show demonstrates the power of street furniture to engage residents (and tourists for that matter) and make the city more accessible.

Created by artists, architects and industrial designers, these 71 benches are cast mostly in bronze and steel. In other words, they are fully usable and impressive objects whether or not you like the individual design. Clearly, serious money has been invested in the program.

Compared to Toronto's faintly ridiculous moose event several years ago, Dialogue is clever and practical. The benches come in all styles and shapes, and have a variety of intentions.

Some are obviously meant to amuse, others to make a statement. Some are quite comfortable, others much less so. Some qualify as sculptures, works of art; others are works of design.

Arranged along the island that runs down the middle of the Paseo, they invite passersby to sit down and stay a while. Best of all, they engage the viewer intellectually as well as physically.

Chairs, of course, have long fascinated architects and designers; everyone from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier to Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry has had a go at the chair. It provides a fertile mix of form and function, meaning and utility. In other words, within the specific limits of the chair, there's all kinds of space for creativity.

The Mexico City exhibition, sponsored by the municipal government and a private organization dedicated to promoting the arts, will remain in place until the end of the year.

The Toronto street furniture contract, however, will last for 20 years. It's important to get it right. But regardless of how the competition ends up, Toronto could still consider a Dialogue kind of event, perhaps for University Ave. (the Paseo of Toronto) and other downtown locations.

The potential is enormous; it could take the city's Cultural Renaissance to a whole new level, perhaps bring it home in a more immediate way than can a building. It would also attract international attention along with the tourist hordes.

And unlike performing arts festivals, it could remain on show for months, not weeks, until the weather grew too cold.

Four-legged creatures come in many forms, but for the purposes of public art, chairs are preferable to ungulates.

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